


Obsessions

by GallicGalaxy



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Eating Disorders, Gen, I thought I already figured out that that's a bad idea, I'm uploading tired again, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, attempted suicide, mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 06:00:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7563037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GallicGalaxy/pseuds/GallicGalaxy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This fic is sorta based on one by prosecutie called <em>The Beginnings of Despair</em>, which is really good and you should read that one too!! This one is about some of the boys instead of the girls, but there are a few other things I did differently (my vignettes are longer, and have a shorter timespan, etc.).</p><p>The song <em>Obsessions</em> by Marina & The Diamonds heavily inspired Nagito's part (as well as the title), and Nagito's part seems weird to me because it's also kind of based on a completely different fic I haven't finished yet. During the process of writing this I completely changed my mind for what I was going to do with Gundam's part but still kinda left the original idea in there, and I also completely re-wrote Nidai's because I hated it.</p><p>And I've given up completely on being consistent with whether I refer to these characters by their first or last names in fics, and that is quite apparent here. *yaaay*</p>
    </blockquote>





	Obsessions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [d20eater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/d20eater/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Beginnings of Despair](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7483968) by [d20eater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/d20eater/pseuds/d20eater). 



> This fic is sorta based on one by prosecutie called _The Beginnings of Despair_ , which is really good and you should read that one too!! This one is about some of the boys instead of the girls, but there are a few other things I did differently (my vignettes are longer, and have a shorter timespan, etc.).
> 
> The song _Obsessions_ by Marina  & The Diamonds heavily inspired Nagito's part (as well as the title), and Nagito's part seems weird to me because it's also kind of based on a completely different fic I haven't finished yet. During the process of writing this I completely changed my mind for what I was going to do with Gundam's part but still kinda left the original idea in there, and I also completely re-wrote Nidai's because I hated it.
> 
> And I've given up completely on being consistent with whether I refer to these characters by their first or last names in fics, and that is quite apparent here. *yaaay*

Souda looked at himself in the mirror as though he didn't quite recognize himself.

He was rubbing at his throat, his eyes wide and glassy, slowly thinking over everything that had happened.

Just a little chubby, she said.

He'd woken up happy. He'd had plans to go to the beach with a bunch of his friends (and, of course, a few friends of friends). He liked the beach. He liked swimming.

It was all Mioda's fault, wasn't it?

 _“Hey, I never noticed, but Souda's a little bit chubby, isn't he?”_ And then she giggled as if there was something undeniably funny about that statement. _“Look at his belly! It's totes adorbz!”_ And then Souda blushed, from a combination of his figure being pointed out in front of everyone (including Sonia) and Mioda referring to it as adorable. He wasn't sure whether to feel flattered or embarrassed.

And then Saionji was just a bully; she was a bully to everyone and there was no use dwelling on anything she said for too long.

But...

_“Did it really take you that long to notice? Are you stupid, or just blind? He looks like a beached whale! Hehe, he's almost as fat as Tsumiki!”_

Mikan wasn't really fat. Not that Souda had ever really been _skinny_ , not skinny like Nagito or Hajime. But he was heavier for his height even than Gundam was...

Saionji was a bully. She said things like that just to get a rise out of people. Just to upset him. Just to upset Tsumiki.

But Tsumiki _had_ gotten upset, hadn't she? Did it really upset her that much to be compared to him? Everything upset Tsumiki, though. He shouldn't put too much stock into what Saionji said about other people or what Tsumiki got upset over.

But it was a bit too late for that now.

Souda rubbed his throat a little more. It hurt. It burned.

His stomach hurt. It felt like it was turning over, still. He felt it clear into his toes. There were tears at the corners of his eyes, but he didn't know if they were watering from how violently he'd vomited or if his emotions had overwhelmed him at last.

It still smelled a little like vomit in his bathroom. Nothing felt real.

It wasn't the kind of thing he'd ever expected himself to end up doing. It seemed so surreal now, after he'd done it. He was breathing deeply, feeling his throat ache as warm air passed through it.

 _You really are unattractive._ He thought to himself as he looked in the mirror. He put one of his hands over his mouth, covering up his ugly teeth. Did he really just go home and puke his guts out because some spoiled little brat called him fat?

Souda rolled his undershirt up over his stomach. How had he not noticed? What had he thought he looked like all this time? No, he'd always known. He just didn't want to confront it.

And then he felt an overwhelming wave of self-loathing, of unexplainable anger and grief and guilt with no outlet. His throat contracted, and he barely managed to steady himself on the counter as he gagged. It was just residual nausea. There was no point in throwing up again; there was nothing that could come up anymore besides bile, and his throat stung enough already.

He ran his hands through his hair. Even that was ugly, but it was probably the most attractive thing about him. He tried to smile at himself in the mirror, but it just made him feel worse when he saw his gross, uneven teeth.

It was in the past. There was nothing that could be done now, except move on. Move on. Take a shower, clear your throat, leave it in the past.

What would happen the next time someone invited him to go swimming? He'd go with them. It wasn't a problem. Well, he'd go with them if he'd lost some weight by then, maybe. No, he'd go either way, right? Right. His friends wouldn't like it if he said no. If he was worried about getting made fun of. Nobody liked a coward.

 _You're already a coward._ He thought to himself. He tore his eyes away from the mirror and decided to just take a shower. He needed one anyway.

He didn't make it two minutes into the shower before he started crying. He knew he was going to cry eventually, but that didn't make it feel any better when it started. He hated himself. For being a coward. For being a crybaby. For being ugly. For being fat. For caring what other people thought of him. He hated himself for hating himself.

He cried for most of his shower. As he dried himself off and brushed his hair, taking careful care to make sure it would stay smooth for a little longer, he resolved to forget about all of this.

Today was a bad day. Everyone had bad days. Everyone did something a little radical every now and again, everybody got emotional sometimes. This was the first and last time, he told himself. He'd never do something like that again.

If only it _was_ the last time.

 

* * *

 

Nagito rubbed at his chin with slender, trembling fingers.

They didn't have his candies here, the ones he always kept in his pocket. Of course, he hadn't been to this little store before, he didn't know what they carried, it was his fault for assuming they'd have the kind of candy he liked here.

And they didn't. So he had a choice; he could walk somewhere else, somewhere he knew had them, but then again he'd chosen this store because it was on the way home, and he'd have to go pretty far out of his way to get to the store he usually went to. So he could just choose a different type of candy, right? There were plenty to choose from.

Too many, maybe. Nagito was locked in a staring contest with the store's candy selection, silently analyzing each bag. He wanted candies that came individually wrapped, so that they would keep if he left them in his pocket. That narrowed down his options, right?

And the ones he usually ate had a pretty mild taste; he didn't like candy that was too sweet or too strong. Most of these were brightly colored, sugar and dye, even worse for him than the ones he normally ate. A lot of them were mixed flavors, but when candy came with a lot of flavors in one bag there were always one or two flavors that he didn't like in there. A lot of candy was like that, trying to please everyone so hard that nobody liked everything about them.

These ones were melon flavored. They seemed like an obvious choice, but then...no, they were too sugary, they looked it. And they weren't hard candies anyway, they were chewy.

 _People are staring._ He thought. _People are staring._ He could feel their gazes like needles pricking under his skin, and he tensed up immediately. _Just pick something._ But the pressure was making it worse, he was just standing there staring at candy, people would be staring at him and wondering why, and why was because the candies he liked to eat weren't here and they were the only thing he ate most of the time and they stopped him from shaking as much and without them in his pocket he felt almost nervous because if he started shaking really bad or if he was practically chewing on his cheeks because of the hunger in his stomach then he'd have nothing to distract himself and when he had something in his mouth nobody asked questions or worried and those candies didn't have very many calories anyway...

The back of Nagito's neck was sweating. He picked up a bag of candies and glanced at how many calories there were, how much sugar and fat there was. But he wasn't going to buy them anyway. His hands were shaking as he set them back down, and he looked back over the shelf of candy, wondering if maybe he'd just missed the kind he usually got and they really were there. But people were staring, staring as they passed by, wondering.

“Excuse me.” A soft, bright voice requested. Nagito froze up and looked without seeing at the owner of the voice. It was a girl, no older than him, probably about his age even. She was smiling naturally, looking at him with wide doe eyes. Nagito stepped back mechanically and heard himself apologize, even though he didn't tell himself to do that. The girl laughed a little and brushed her way forward, grabbing a bag of candy from the shelf. Hard candies, really bright ones, the kind Nagito didn't like.

Nagito shoved his hands in his pockets and walked away, trying not to sprint as he made his way out the door. It didn't matter, it didn't matter. He'd just get some of his normal candies tomorrow, or whenever he went out again. Without having to make a decision like that, without people staring at him, probably thinking that a boy like him didn't need candy anyway.

That was bad luck, right? Bad luck that that store hadn't had the kind of candy he liked. But good luck should follow. Good luck would follow. Besides, he could've chosen another type of candy anyway. He could eat any kind of candy he wanted. He could eat whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, right?

If only he really could.

 

* * *

 

It was cold outside.

Fuyuhiko pulled his knees up to his chest. One of the few things he could appreciate about being as small as he was was that it gave him a notable advantage when it came to hiding. For example, he was pretty good at climbing trees. The higher branches supported him well, certainly better than they'd support anyone much heavier than him.

His parents would know where he was. Once they were fed up with beating the shit out of each other and finally decided to start caring about where he was. Fuyuhiko could feel himself shivering, but he just balled himself up tighter. No use crying about it.

No use crying about anything. He never cried, not even when he lost a fight. And he'd lost plenty of fights.

He could hear them yelling from here. He could've sworn he heard his sister's voice too – that wasn't too surprising, since she got involved in their parents' fights more often than she needed too. Fuyuhiko just ran away and pretended like it wasn't happening. He sat alone in a tree and shivered and hid like a fucking baby.

He always had Peko. She was always there, but more in the sense that a boulder or a tree or a piece of furniture was always there. Stoic and unchanging. She did what she was meant to, and she did what he told her to. But he always remembered being a little kid and seeing other kids' friends cheer them up when they were sad, or smile and laugh and tell jokes with them, and there were times when he looked at Peko next to him and he was struck by a strange kind of deep, frustrated anger. He wanted to yell at her, ask her why she couldn't just act like a normal human being and comfort him or just talk to him instead of staring blankly at everything like she was a robot.

But he never did. That little flare of anger got compressed and packed down in the deepest part of his stomach, along with everything he ever felt. It wasn't like he had any room to accuse someone else of behaving like a robot, anyway. He was just as guilty of repressing his emotions, only Peko was usually much better at it than he was.

Fuyuhiko felt something warm and watery hit his hand. His first thought was that it was blood, since he'd found himself bleeding unexpectedly more times than he cared to count. Usually when his sister came up and cut him or stabbed him when he wasn't looking.

But it wasn't blood. He was crying.

He'd opened the Pandora's box of emotions in the pit of his stomach, all so tightly compressed and interwoven that he couldn't even tell one from another.

He buried his face in his knees and tried to stop himself. But the tears kept coming just as violently, as if a dam behind his eyes had burst. Every sob took the breath right out of his tiny, miserable lungs.

 _What the fuck do you think you're doing? You think crying is going to make anything better?_ He screamed internally. He could almost hear himself yelling it at someone else, pretending like he never cried about anything ever. He bit his lip to stifle himself, and every time he felt his body convulse from a sob he sank his teeth in further.

He felt something warm and watery run down his chin. This time it _was_ blood. It was in his mouth, too; he was very familiar with the taste of blood.

He realized that his lip hurt, and he released his teeth. A drop of blood fell off his chin and hit his hand. He let it slide off his finger and hit the ground below.

He could hear the dogs now, over where he'd been hearing his parents' voices. So, they were coming for him already. He had a very brief window of time to make it look like he hadn't been crying.

He'd bitten clear through his lower lip. It was going to need stitches. He wiped his eyes with the cuffs of his sleeves and prayed that his parents wouldn't ask why he'd bitten a hole in his lip.

If only they hadn't.

 

* * *

 

He told everyone the scars were from animals.

Some of them were. But not all of them.

Some of them were from himself. But they looked like they could have been from animals; only Gundam would've really known.

He traced his fingers over some of the ones he remembered were from him. He remembered standing over this very same bathroom sink, sliding the knife against his skin. Just deep enough to make him forget about things that hurt way worse. And he remembered wishing that he was brave enough to cut deeper. After all, what good could come from an unholy union between a human and a demon?

A demon. What else did you call a creature with hands that big, so rough they felt like they cut into your skin, so hot they almost burned? A creature who smiled when it hurt other living things? A creature so loud and so horrible and so unfairly strong, so unfairly big, especially when you were small and you didn't eat much and you were young and your wrists were thin and...

Gundam felt something brush up against the side of his face. It was just enough to shock him out of his trance.

All that was over. It had been over for years. It had been over since the night when his mother and held him close to her chest on the couch in the new house which was somehow even smaller than the old one, and she'd cried and cried and kept repeating, _“He can't hurt you anymore, he won't hurt you anymore.”_

But even then he'd still had nightmares, sleeping in a strange place, especially in the dark. Nightmares about that darkness, about huge hands coming out of that darkness and wrapping around his wrists and touching his back and pulling on his hair, hands forcing his wrist against the ground so hard that it broke, a hand wrapping itself over his mouth when he tried to say _“Don't touch me!”_. Don't touch me. Don't touch me.

And pain. Bruises on his ribs, on his thighs, all over his wrist. Pain. No animal that bit him or clawed him or kicked him could ever hurt like that.

He felt something brush against his face again, and his hand instinctively went up to it in a blind panic. It was only when he felt fur against his fingers that he realized it wasn't a human that was touching him.

Of course. His Four Dark Devas of Destruction. Looking out for him.

He'd always liked animals. They were easy to read if you knew how, and very seldom did they do anything for no reason – especially attack. He wasn't afraid to be touched by them, and they never asked him why he didn't like to be touched or why he spent so much time alone. They offered him comfort, and they asked for so little in return.

Gundam was surprised to find himself huddled on the floor. He must've gotten down there while he was locked up in his painful memories. He stood up immediately and adjusted his scarf. Now, that was no way for the supreme overlord of ice to be behaving.

But despite his attempts to cheer himself up, he sighed again. It seemed like every time something managed to pull him away, those memories pulled him back in. As he bound his hand again, he remembered the time when the bandages had concealed more than just old scars. They'd hidden fresh cuts, too, but now the two had melded into one.

And he remembered even before that, a time when that same wrist was bound, but not because of animal bites or knife cuts. Because it had been broken, on that one night, the only night the demon had ever broken one of his bones. The first time and the last time.

And there he was again, getting wrapped up in memories like his left arm was wrapped in bandages.

If only he could've just forgotten about it all.

 

* * *

 

Every time his heart lurched, it frightened him.

Nidai's hand went to his chest, and for a moment he dropped out of the present and he was standing in his room again, holding those white pills in a weak little hand that was shaking more than it ever had before or since.

What a terrible thing to flash back to, all because his heart scared him a little. It was strange that he'd remembered that, and not any of the other times he'd had to be rushed to the hospital when he was younger.

Younger. He tried to remember himself when he was that young. He was much smaller, much shyer, much sadder. He flipped back to the real world for a second, and there were his friends. Enjoying themselves. Running without any aim or goal, with the smiles of reckless youth painted across their faces. Feeling something he'd never been able to feel. It was a specific type of recklessness: not the kind of recklessness that was spawned from knowingly doing something that was dangerous, but rather a kind of recklessness spawned from not caring about anything, not worrying about anything. Forgetting about the things that bothered them.

Nidai took a deep breath and folded his arms across his chest. He let everyone else keep going, running along the beach as they took full advantage of the tropical summer evening. He could hear their scattered voices, loud and bright, some of the girls squealing as the waves crept up on their bare feet.

It still reminded him of his childhood. Nothing had changed, had it? It was just that his younger self had been acutely aware of how miserable it was to sit on the sidelines, to be left out. To never be able to do what everyone else could, to never be able to just stop worrying. Because he was born sick and he would always be sick. Because his existence was inherently flawed, and not in a minor way. In a way that had been threatening to kill him since he was born, hovering over his bed and whispering curses into his ear, biting at his heels and filling him with fear.

He watched his friends as they ran further, racing along the beach, no meaning in their actions. Nidai was back to remembering, thinking about the white pills in his shaking hands, about the blurry, broken pieces of memory that came after that. About how he hadn't known how many he needed to take but he didn't have time to worry because his mother was going to be home soon, about them breaking into his room, the smell of vomit reeking in his nose and all over everything. And he was sort of aware of his environment but he couldn't really move and it reminded him of when he'd woken up one time in the middle of the night and his limbs had been numb and he hadn't realized that he was having a heart attack. And his mother crying, crying like he'd never seen anyone cry, and begging him to look at her, please just look at her, as if everything would be okay if he would just look at her, wake up and look at her, stay awake and please just look at me baby.

She'd still been crying when he woke up in the hospital. It wasn't the first or the last time he'd wake up in a hospital. There was a nurse there trying to comfort his mother, probably because her crying was upsetting people. He could see it in her eyes that she thought it was her fault. After all, it had been her pills that he'd stolen from the medicine cabinet. If they'd been stimulants, he probably would've had a heart attack. But they weren't.

“Hey, coach, whatcha doin'?”

Akane's voice snapped him back to reality. The evening wind was sweeping through her hair, and her eyes were wide and curious.

“Thinking.” He answered cryptically.

“About what?” Akane demanded. He couldn't tell her he was remembering a time when he'd been younger and he'd hated himself more than anything, when he felt like his life was meaningless because he would always be left out. Because he was born sick and he would always be sick. Because the things that normal people did to attain that worry-free recklessness were the types of things he couldn't do at all.

So he just said, “Something from a long time ago.” And he turned toward her and smiled a little and added, “Don't worry about me, Akane. I'll be fine.”

If only that were true.


End file.
